THE HANGMAN'S OFFICE.
THE irritation created by the conduct of the present Execu- tioner, Binns, seems likely to lead to an injudicious agita- tion for a change in the present method' of inflicting capital punishment. Public opinion in England, though as yet tolerant of the capital penalty for the gravest of crimes, without which it is felt human life would be much less safe, is intensely sensitive on the subject of torture to the condemned, even when unintentionally inflicted, and greatly shocked—as we think, rightly shocked—by anything approaching irreverence among the officials concerned in an execution. In the worst days of a cruel age, if the swordsman employed to execute prisoners struck twice, he risked the vengeance of the crowd; and some sanctity attaches to the dying, even when the dying is a criminal. It is felt, and rightly and properly felt, that although society for its own protection must retain the extreme right of inflict- ing death in self-defence, yet it is an extreme right, and one which should be exercised by all concerned, from the Judge who condemns to the executioner who hangs, with reluctance, in grave sadness, and in a mood of passionless sobriety. There is something even more horrible in disorder at an execution than in levity at a funeral, for in the former case the corpse, so to speak, feels the outrage as much as the spectators. When, therefore, in one case a man has, as it were, to be executed twice—this was not Binns, however,—and in another the noose does not kill at once, and in a third the executioner is said to be too intoxicated to perform his duty, and when, in addition to these things, the executions are succeeded and preceded by noisy "receptions," sales of "relics," and bouts of drinking, opinion is naturally outraged ; and an un- thinking cry arises for some change in the method of execution, of which this time the Times has made itself the exponent. That journal deliberately pleads for the abolition of hanging, as the most odious of methods, and the substitution of death by shooting, or by some other of the many methods of terminating life which scientific men could suggest.
We cannot agree. That order and certainty should be re- stored to executions by the appointment of a more capable officer to superintend them, and by a great alteration in the method of actually terminating life, is imperatively necessary ; but the rope will remain, we think, the fittest instrument with which to carry out the sentence of the law. We think it to be demon- strable that so long as the sentence of death is retained—that is, so long as the nation retains its present creed, and feels for society more than for the individual—three conditions as to the method of inflicting it should be resolutely maintained. The mode of execution adopted should be sudden, it should visibly shatter the corpse as little as possible, and it should be one held by opinion to be in itself disgraceful ; and no method, except hanging, fulfils all those conditions. Sudden death could, of course, be inflicted in a hundred ways, many of them more rapid even than the noose. Shooting, if the heart is pierced, or the brain, is probably as rapid as any ; the guillotine is swifter than the hangman, despite some doubts as to the instantaneous loss of the victim's consciousness, and it would be easily possible to
employ agencies more rapid than either. There are poisons too rapid in their action for pain, and one of them could be adminis- tered, we believe, during sleep. Electricians can prove, we are told, that the electric fluid mom more rapidly than sensation does, and hold it, therefore, probable that an electric shock sufficient to kill instantly would never be felt by the criminal at all, death preceding sensation, a view borne out, so far as such views can be, by the usual testimony of those who have received and survived a stroke of lightning. Any one of these methods, therefore, would be as satisfactory, so far as suddenness and the absence of any approach to torture is concerned, as hanging ; but the first two diminish that respect for the body which the whole history of brutal assaults shows it so necessary to main- tain, and which is, we think, the true objection to that ghastly
but painless mode of execution, blowing from a cannon ; and the third is liable to an objection of its own, that
it is not wise to make death for crime much more pain- less than natural death usually is. We should not make it painful, but we should not artificially reduce its terrors. The awe with which the punishment is regarded would be gravely diminished by the use of painless poison, such as the Athenians used, while a new doubt would be begotten among the ignorant as to the reality of its infliction. They would begin talking of strong sleeping draughts, and of drugs which could produce apparent death—that is, catalepsy—without actually killing.
It is most important that no colour should be given to such stories, and important, too, not to degrade science by making it an accomplice in the executioner's task, as it would be if the electric battery were employed. Men ought not to lose the sense that there is something rough and brutal about capital punishment, that it is essentially a last appeal to force in its most direct and savage form, when every other means appear from experience to have failed. We greatly doubt, moreover, whether the multitude would be- lieve in the painlessness of death by electricity, and whether the lightning-stroke would not evoke that shudder of sym- pathy with the condemned which so utterly " demoralises the guillotine," and which the idea of torture, in this age at all events, never fails to elicit in England. There would be too much of the air of a scientific experiment in every execution, and a single instance of failure would, till the rapid increase of murder recalled the people to themselves, be fatal to the punishment of death.
The most real and vital objection to these modes of execution, and to many more with which we will not protract a disagree- able discussion, is, however, the comparative absence 'of the idea of disgrace. Why this idea should in England have attached itself with such bewildering intensity to a special method of execution, we are unable fully to explain. The horror is not excited by the method of death only, or there would not be so many suicides by hanging, and it would be less strictly confined to a single people, nor is it entirely caused by the connection between the rope and violent crime. The taint adheres, though in less measure, when the victim has subsequently been proved innocent, or when, as in some Irish cases, he has been regarded almost as a martyr. The horror is probably produced by many combined feelings, strengthened by the kind of accident which fills each race with a hatred of some particular punish- ment. The Frenchman has for nearly a century rejected the lash with horror, though the Englishman is barely yet awake to the notion that it degrades—he would not have felt that, but for its use as an instrument of military discipline —and the Asiatic still regards it as merely one instrument among many inflicting pain. No one, however, doubts that the feeling exists, or that it would be many years, possibly many centuries, before a similar loathing would attach itself to any novel method of execution. Certainly it would not to any kind of execution by the sword—which has been ennobled in this country by its use for political, and therefore often innocent criminals—or to death by fire-arms, or to any of the often- suggested scientific methods. To get rid of this idea of disgrace world materially weaken the deterrent effect of the punishment, and therefore the moral repulsion to- wards the crimes for which it is inflicted, which punish- ment is intended incidentally to evoke. It is true, the disgrace should consist in the offence, and not in its punishment, but laws are not made for those who perceive clearly such distinctions. The mass of mankind are still very rude, and legislators too often forget how rade men con- fuse crime and its punishment,—how greatly, in some cases, the law helps to create conscience; or how little among the violent classes, or classes embittered by circumstance, like the Irish agrarian criminals, murder is restrained by the horror naturalis. Something more is required, which is given, in England at least, by the horror popularis indissolubly associated by tradition with the gallows.
With the rest of the Times' argument we are heartily in accord. It will be thoroughly discreditable to the Home Office if, merely out of reluctance to perform a painful duty, it does not at once reform the Executioner's office, till exhibitions such as have recently shocked the country shall become impossible. The man employed should be paid properly, so as to avoid any temptation to make money in any way out of the details of his ghastly office ; and he should, if that be possible, be invariably a ticket-of-leave man, liable to be sent back to prison if he neglects his duty, or performs it in any spirit except that of silent and skilful obedience to the law. Science should be called in, not to pro- vide a new method of execution, but to settle, once for all, what is the method of banging at once least painful, most rapid, and most certain. It is disgraceful to leave such essentials as the size of the rope, or the length of the drop, or the use of knots, to the judgment of a callous and, it may be, prejudiced man, and so run the risk of inflicting not only death, but torture utterly useless, whether to the victim himself, who has no time to benefit by pain, or to the world, which only shudders, without dreading the punishment more. The Doctors will tell the Office, we believe, that the brutal English method is all wrong, that in America they know better, and that death by hanging may be reduced to a certainty, and produced by the placing of a foot on a treddle ; but that is beside our object, which is to urge that their duty is to obtain clear information, act on it, and sweep away even the chance of a recurrence of scenes, such as those which have in the last six months outraged the public, and endangered the penalty of death.
Previous page
